‘Sanctuary schools’ vs Trump’s immigration policy: a true battlefield

From LA to Miami and till New York, huge amount of school districts are vowing to shield students and their families from immigration authorities.

Students from high schools in South Florida are against Donald Trump’s immigration policies and ask that their schools should be re-named to ‘sanctuaries’.

It’s been 6 months since 14-year-old Fatima Avelica watched, sobbing, as immigration agents picked up her father on their way to her school.

Rómulo Avelica-González, a father of a girl who’s name Fatima on the photo below who immigrated illegally from Mexico in the early 1990s, had driven Fatima and her 12-year-old sister, Yuleni, to school in Los Angeles each morning for years, despite a deportation order hanging over his head. But a month after President Donald Trump took office as chief of the country and called for ramped-up immigration arrests, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulled over the family’s car.

The overwhelming video of father’s arrest by police that Fatima took on her phone camera from the backseat in the car went viral, capturing a moment that would come to symbolize the anguish of schoolchildren who have seen their families torn apart by aggressive immigration enforcement, as well as the anxiety of others who worry their families could be next. It is horrifying actually, when kids see their entire world ruining.

For many of the estimated 1 million undocumented children in the US — and the roughly 4.5 million young people, like Fatima and Yuleni, born here and with at least one undocumented parent (like Fatima and Yuleni) — anxiety travels with them from home to school, creating a climate of fear in which learning is disrupted and classrooms are destabilized. But think a little, these kids were born in States, and they are citizens despite their parents not.

As Donald Trump became a President and made everything possible for tightens immigration enforcement, education officials across the country are launching a national resistance movement, declaring their schools “sanctuaries” or in different words make them “saint” from Trump’s immigration policies. Superintendents and school board members from areas as diverse as Miami, Milwaukee, Chicago, New York City, Des Moines and Portland, Oregon have created or revised “sanctuary school” resolutions and i-petitions, vowing to shield students’ personal data from immigration authorities and block federal agents’ access to school property unless they show an official warrant.

California is a state where about 250,000 undocumented children are enrolled in public schools and 750,000 have at least one undocumented parent — is at the forefront of the movement. Through the state of California, about 60 schools and county education offices have adopted resolutions to safeguard undocumented childrens in the schools. Lawmakers are also debating a “sanctuary state” bill that, in part, takes aim at potential data mining that could use students’ personal information to uncover their immigration status.

“It’s not that the public school necessarily has a file that says, ‘These kids are undocumented’ and ‘These kids aren’t undocumented,’” said Adam Schwartz, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group that fights for online privacy. Rather, schools collect all kinds of personal information about students, including addresses and languages spoken at home. “One database by itself might not tell you anything,” he said. “But when you sew it all together, when this puzzle comes together, a motivated party could use this to begin to identify who undocumented immigrants are.”

All the kids living in USA have the legal right to attend public schools, regardless of their immigration status, due to a 1982 Supreme Court decision. And since 2011 Immigration and Customs Enforcement has maintained a policy of avoiding enforcement activities at schools. In a statement, agency spokeswoman Jennifer Elzea said the policy remains in effect under the Trump administration, adding that the Department of Homeland Security is “committed to ensuring that people seeking to participate in activities or utilize services provided at any sensitive location are free to do so without fear or hesitation,” though she added that authorities “will no longer exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement”.

Still, many immigrant families worry that enrollment in school could create data and paper trails that expose them to possible enforcement action. And Trump’s executive orders on immigration encourage collaboration between federal and local authorities, triggering concern that local police officers stationed inside schools might share information with federal immigration agents.

In the first 100 days after Trump signed executive orders ramping up immigration enforcement, federal agents arrested more than 41,000 people for civil immigration offenses, a 38% increase over the same period in 2016. His proposed 2018 budget, which faces an uphill battle in Congress, calls for the hiring of an additional 1,500 immigration agents at a cost of $300 million and earmarks $1.5 billion for expanding detention and deportation efforts.

On 2 August, President Trump announced a proposal that would halve the number of legal immigrants admitted to the country over the next decade.

The heightened enforcement has brought heightened anxiety. After the latest presidential election, when Donald Trump was chosen as a President of the US, some schools saw marked drops in attendance as immigrant parents, afraid of exposing their children to the authorities, kept their kids at home.

That sort of talk, some school officials say, is why sanctuary resolutions are so important. School is a place that be safe for a 100%. The tendency of last years is horrible. Starting from gun shoots in schools and now, ends with deportations. That is why schools all over need to become “saint” for the kids.